November 25, 2012 AT 11:30 am

Adafruit Digital Assignable RGB Strips Used for One Dimensional PONG Game

Needing a Christmas present for his 4- and 5-year-old nieces, [John] built a one-dimensional PONG game, sure to be the delight of rosy-cheeked children on a Christmas morn.

The new and improved 1D PONG game is built around a digital RGB LED strip with an LPD8806 LED controller. The speed of the ‘ball’ is controlled by a pot on one side of the game. With each player pressing their button at the right time, the ball bounces back to the other player. Missing the ball awards a point to the other team and most likely an increase in the player’s frustration, greatly increasing the risk of this game being thrown across the room.

Featured Adafruit Products!

Digital Addressable RGB LED w/ PWM waterproof flexi strip: New! We have upgraded these strips from the old HL1606 chipset to the latest and greatest, the LPD8806 – a chip that has hi-speed full-color PWM built in! The old HL1606-based strips did not have PWM built in (they could only display 9 colors by default) the new ones can display 2 MILLION colors per pixel. These LED strips are fun and glowy. There are 32 RGB LEDs per meter, and you can control each LED individually! Yes, that’s right, this is the digitally-addressable type of LED strip. You can set the color of each LED’s red, green and blue component with 7-bit PWM precision (so 21-bit color per pixel). The LEDs are controlled by shift-registers that are chained up down the strip so you can shorten or lengthen the strip. Only 2 digital output pins are required to send data down. The PWM is built into each chip so once you set the color you can stop talking to the strip and it will continue to PWM all the LEDs for you. (read more)